LinkedIn's engineering interviews vary by specialty. A Systems and Infrastructure engineer and a Senior Data Engineer may both solve algorithms, but one report emphasizes distributed scheduling while the other spends time on SQL and data architecture. The two accounts below should be read separately.
Systems and Infrastructure Engineering, 5.5 years' experience
The Bangalore candidate described a recruiter screen, phone interview, and four onsite rounds. The phone screen included All Oone Data Structure (source) and a follow-up about duplicate elements (same report). Onsite DSA questions were Find K Closest Elements (source) and Find the Celebrity (source). A later DSA round included Max Consecutive Ones III (source) and a graph task to find and print a shortest path (source). All are named in the LinkedIn SSE interview report (2025).
Two system-design prompts were reported: enrich catalog events arriving at Google scale for analytics (source), and design a distributed job scheduler that fetches machines, runs jobs, and triggers alerts (source). The author also described questions about load balancing, Kubernetes, paging, thrashing, segmentation, page faults, mutexes, semaphores, Java garbage collection, and OOP in the same report.
Senior Data Engineer, IC3
A separate onsite report describes an online assessment with two DSA and two SQL questions, followed by a phone screen covering DSA and a SQL window/rank problem. The onsite DSA round included a top-k elements problem (source) and a scenario-based data-structure choice (source). The data-manipulation round used timestamp and ranking scenarios solved with SQL or PySpark (same report). The LinkedIn Senior Data Engineer report (2025) does not name the OA problems, so no titles are supplied here.
That report also describes an end-to-end data architecture round focused on ETL, storage, and query optimization, plus a technical project discussion and a hiring-manager round. These stages are a candidate's account, not a promise of five rounds for every data role.
How to prepare for the LinkedIn SWE and data-engineering interviews
For infrastructure roles, practice the operation costs and edge cases of each data structure, then be ready to discuss failure handling in a distributed design. For data engineering, rehearse SQL window functions and explain how event time, late data, and query patterns affect storage. For broad practice, see system design questions and our interview experience hub.
More LinkedIn engineering interview reports
The collected reports include frontend, infrastructure, and machine-learning roles in addition to the Systems and Infrastructure SWE and Senior Data Engineer accounts above. These are separate candidate experiences.
LinkedIn SWE report from India
One candidate reported four coding prompts and a design task:
- Find the diameter of a binary tree. (LeetCode LinkedIn SWE report)
- Find the closest values to a target in a binary-search tree, with a logarithmic-time follow-up. (same report)
- Solve a variation of Find K Pairs with Smallest Sums. (same report)
- Solve a Number of Islands variation, with BFS and diagonal traversal as follow-ups. (same report)
- Design Google Calendar. (same report)
Infrastructure and platform roles
An IC2 Systems Infrastructure candidate described designing an inverted index over a stream of LinkedIn posts, then returning post IDs that contain all queried words. The same report mentions implementing social-network methods using graph traversal, and asks why the candidate wanted to join LinkedIn and about a project they were proud of. (LeetCode LinkedIn IC2 Systems Infra report)
A separate SSE infrastructure account named Find Leaves of Binary Tree and asked how garbage collection works and how a collector decides which objects to delete. (LeetCode LinkedIn SSE Infrastructure report)
A Bangalore SRE/platform account reports SQL versus NoSQL, operating-systems basics, caching, implementing alert thresholds, and “Why do you want to leave Oracle? Why LinkedIn?” (LeetCode LinkedIn Bangalore SDE report)
A separate October 2025 senior-engineer account asks how the candidate measured project success, including performance testing and p90 metrics, and what differences they noticed between their current and previous companies. (LeetCode LinkedIn SSE report) Another infrastructure-track report asks why the candidate wants to join LinkedIn and what they want in their next role. (LeetCode LinkedIn SWE infrastructure report)
AI and machine-learning roles
An AI Engineer virtual-onsite report names validating a binary search tree and designing a two-tower architecture using cosine similarity. (LeetCode LinkedIn AI Engineer report) A separate Machine Learning Engineer account names partitioning an array into K equal-sum subsets and a recommendation-and-ranking system design prompt. (LeetCode LinkedIn Machine Learning report)
These role-specific examples should not be read as one shared LinkedIn interview loop.
Frequently asked questions
Should LinkedIn data-engineering candidates use the SWE loop as their template?
No. The two reports describe different jobs. The Systems and Infrastructure account emphasizes DSA and distributed systems; the Senior Data Engineer account includes SQL, PySpark, and data architecture.
Run it on Parlel
Start with the specific LinkedIn role you want. Parlel's company directory can help you identify hiring teams to contact as you prepare.